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From nothing: let the sound emerge out of silence, beginning inaudibly and growing from there.
Printed beneath the note where a crescendo hairpin begins, or shown by a small circle (sometimes an n) at the hairpin’s narrow end. Its scope is that one emergence: the hairpin carries the sound to the dynamic printed at its wide end. Its mirror is al niente, a hairpin closing into a circle.
It asks for an entry the listener senses before hearing — a texture rather than an attack. Strings, clarinets and voices manage it most easily; brass and double reeds must start some sound, so give them a comfortable register, an unhurried tempo and a note long enough to grow. State the dynamic it grows to, and avoid stacking several dal niente entries where a missed start would leave a hole.
Dal niente is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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